The present invention relates to free-breathing cardiac magnetic resonance imaging, and more particularly, to image combination to perform retrospective noise suppression for free-breathing cardiac magnetic resonance imaging.
Cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) is an important non-invasive modality for studying heart functions. However, the majority of cardiac studies rely on breath-held, segmented data acquisition, mainly due to the rapid and periodic beating of the human heart and limitations of imaging efficiency of conventional MR systems. Unfortunately, breath holding is often particularly difficult for patients with congestive heart disease of for uncooperative pediatric subjects. Accordingly, real-time cardiac imaging is of clinical interest. However, real-time imaging techniques, when compared to breath-held acquisitions, often compromise spatial/temporal resolution or sacrifice signal to noise ratio (SNR) to fit into a tight acquisition window, despite the broad use of parallel imaging and rapid imaging sequences.